The
"aestheticization of politics", to employ Duncan's pertinent term
summing up the implications of the previous post here, has surely proven one
of
the more useful ways for a culture founded in permanent war and mindless
mechanical brutality to divert the attention of so-called "educated
people" from the nastiness of political reality.

American
poetry was already moribund before KG hit the scene; this particularly
noisome, aggressively careeristic contender, and his genuflecting chorus
of shallow admirers and imitators, have merely performed the
condescending, insulting burial rites, with a sneer and a shrug on the
way out the door to the Ivy League conference room and then the bank.

You
can actually meet youthful (well, under forty anyway) aspiring
"artists" who
speak in tones of awe and reverence of certain "iconic" poets/performers
(currently every poet is first a performer) whose "works" and
"performances" are impressively, in fact legendarily, dull, and widely
regarded as all but interminable. In fact, to be completely honest, it's
also rumoured these colossal experiments in tedium do indeed eventually
come to some sort of whimpering conclusion, however unnoted that
merciful point of terminus except by the intermittent punctuation of fitful snores ("Wake up, Amy dear, it's over!") -- the sort of
soundtrack one imagines accompanying the slow stages of declension of that
famous tree falling in that famous forest no one's ever visited, not
that there have not been curators all across the managed arts world
yearning to make the self-martyring junket, if only mythic forests could
be located by GPS. The ability to
sit through these performances, or events, or whatever they are called
this week, is, by all accounts, an athletic feat of sorts, demanding a
strength that truly boggles the imagination. Primary audience
qualifications:
patience and permission, an instinctive desire to submit to social
control, along with powerful self-punitive impulses, deep in origin,
putatively infinite, possibly inexhaustible. Pleasure does not appear
anywhere in this picture; how could it?

In the upper reaches of the well appointed institutional halls the wig bubbles drift... drift...

As
for this particular personage of contemporary interest, Mr Goldsmith, I
reckon he has got more mileage out of his own overwhelming boringness
and inability to write than any ten other less boring writers put
together.

Of course, he's cleverly made a great plus out of being such a total bore.

"I am the most boring writer that has ever lived. If there were an
Olympic sport for extreme boredom, I would get a gold medal. My books
are impossible to read straight through. In fact, every time I have to
proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep
repeatedly. You really don't need to read my books to get the idea of
what they're like; you just need to know the general concept."

Can it have been an accident that KG chose to identify with their brand?

The PSBs' concentration on image, presentation and design, and the
purposeful appeal to an affluent West End party-animal audience base, along with the
extreme sensitivity to style evolution in fashion and electronica which characterize the work of this fantastically
successful pop act, offer
perhaps a relevant career-engineering analogy, here.

The
PSB video I've linked to in the comments was shot by the American fashion
photographer, Bruce Weber, at the time the world's most successful
producer of "aestheticized" images designed to move units in volume.

Aestheticized
images of buffed, lithe, young mostly male models in scanty underwear
catapulted Weber to the top. His Calvin Klein ads became classic. He
also provided brand images for Ralph Lauren, Pirelli, Abercrombie and
Fitch, Revlon, Gianni Versace, et al, and, in his active years, was constantly on assignment
for GQ, Vanity Fair, Elle, Vogue, Rolling Stone et al. The look, touch,
polish, sheen, sexual electricity of money have never had a more skillful
promoter. Being boring has never been made to seem less, or perhaps one ought to say more, boring.

Kenny Goldsmith's
unapologetic, industrious project of working himself into the power
centers of the culture -- easily done, once the first self-marketing
efforts have been successfully negotiated -- provides an object lesson
in how late capitalist culture, through its designated
culture-industry agents and agencies, finds cunning ways to destroy
what remained of value in previous cultures (in this case, an art
form, poetry, toward which KG and his idolators, unwilling to take the
time to learn anything, and
in any case unable to make anything interesting of anything they may accidentally have learned, pretend a
superior, patronizing disdain), while the individuals concerned
concurrently proceed insect-like toward personal career objectives. These latter submerged-motive, para-literary efforts are in KG mythology
commonly disguised as forwarding the interests of some vague phantom "collective", a falsification exploded in the
moment we learn that Goldsmith, evangelist of total electronic
permission, is right now doing his damndest to remove all record of this very
embarrassing show -- this reading, to a group of young, privileged whites, of the Michael Brown autopsy report, with slight emendations made "for poetic effect" (!) -- to remove it, expunge it, eradicate it from, of all places... yes, Goldsmith's own private briar patch and hatching-ground, the glorious Internet!

Managed an early walk and then rain all day! A boy has to amuse himself
the best he can! #beingboring: image via Dietrich Dachshund
@Dietrichsausage, 16 February 2015

The prototypes for the stylistic moves
are too abundant to require enumeration. By the time KG was squirted
forth into the world, the discoveries, adventures, reversals, delights
and miseries of experimental art and writing had been worked virtually
to death.

In
New York in the 1960s, the work of Duchamp, Cage,
and other pioneers had been assimilated and was already providing signals for future
advances -- which were in turn then to be made by the group of unsuspecting young smarties hanging reverentially about the fringes of the scene. In these years, with
consummate wit worthy of a L'il Abner, fatal admission time, I
heroically championed, or represented, or whatever the word would be, in The Paris Review, and later on also in hundreds of newspaper and
periodical reviews in a lot of now forgotten places, much of what happened next. Mea culpa, my bad, silly silly me. What Kenny Goldsmith would later do to curry favour and appear interesting on the art scene, I did, back then, to undermine, subvert and disrupt. Indeed I actually believed, get this, mirabile dictu, that that's what poets are meant to do! I
ran entire long "found" poems, attributed by me to nonexistent authors,
in the august pages of an international arts magazine (covertly "in part" funded, as it would turn out, and quite fittingly, when you think of it, by the CIA) -- whose traditionally dormant celebrity editor finally exhibited a bit of mild dismay, when his high society friends began to wonder how it had come to pass that, for instance,
The Paris Review had published a long, strange, maybe "found", maybe
not "found" but oh no invented, poem by one "Dave Mokshi", in which were included, among other gems, the American-haiku-ish lines "Kissinger/fucked in ass/by starlet". This at the time Big Hank was running the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia, and "dating" the "actress" Jill St. John. The social circles and the B-52 targeting maps had a way of eerily overlapping, in those curious years. This problematic habit of "accepting" what were thought to be "over the transom submissions", exercised over a period of time, finally brought about the desired result of releasing me from a job I'd held for ten years, originally worked very hard at, finally hated, and never in any case earned a penny from. So that, in every possible way, I showed myself at every turning to be too dumb to embrace the far more profitable KG model of respectable, polite, academically condoned, manageable, harmless, white-people-ish kiss-uppy "literary appropriation". I was struggling under the delusion that the point of the technique was not only to distance, to mystify, but to stir up actual trouble, in areas where trouble badly needed to be stirred up. The oppressive
New York high art/high society world, to start with. No complicated
political analysis has ever been required to sort the connection between
American wealth and American wars. For personal as well as "political"
reasons, I hated those wars, and that arrangement, and still do, to my
own career detriment. Which would be too bad for me, were it not for my perpetual and deliberate failure to do anything that looked to have some possible career value attached. People I published back then -- a lot of whom were nobodies at the time, not yet brushed by so much as a single flake of iconic stardust -- are celebrities now; why am I not impressed? For that matter, when I see how KG's little train jumped the rails at Brown with that autopsy-report stunt, I've got to wonder -- what can the man have been thinking? That it is possible, given the massive issuance of slack that routinely accompanies iconic status, for one to be at the same time cute, challenging, adorable, disrespectful, unaware, clever, and absolutely clueless -- and get away with it?

The
"concept" of "boring" was originally a popular in-crowd joke. Andy Warhol's
deadpan embrace of boredom, which came fairly easy to him, as he was
always so very, very bored, to the point of ostentation, and always so very, very, very boring, to the point of rudeness, had
great influence.

When
Andy put out a 25 hour movie, people actually tried to sit through it. I
sat through Chelsea Girls in the movie house on Second Ave just above
St Marks Place. Ted Berrigan was also present. Ted's reaction, afterwards,
with eyes rolling, large knowing grin: "Pretty boring!"

Even in those antediluvian times, however, a difference was perceived between boring-boring and interesting-boring.

Being
boring-boring, that is, boring not-on-purpose, was an immediately recognisable form of what Lenny Bruce, a far more penetrating voice in those
years than that of any poet -- always true, often angry, never bored, never boring, perpetually hounded by puritan law and
order, soon silenced -- called "square".

The
term has lost all meaning. Now, in this country, only the squares
survive. Everybody else is out on the streets, trying to find and defend a
night doorway to huddle up and lie down in.

In
this dead landscape, the King of the Squares shows up in the Ivy
League, lays down his abominable Mike Brown autopsy riff, conveniently
aborting on the unremarkable genitalia ("poetic effect"), everybody gets
a little I-was-there tingle, and goes home, treasuring their
having been present at such an event, even though the event was clearly
so awful.

At
least the Pet Shop Boys knew what rhythm is. You can tell. The song
I've linked to has a rhythm track stolen directly from Curtis Mayfield,
an artist as superior in quality to the PSBs as, say, the conversation
of kids larking about on a corner is to the "uncreative uncreativity" of
our Kenny G, the shameless bluffer from downtown Penn Clown.

Interesting
boring had to have a bit of an edge, a bit of danger, a bit of the
untamed, perhaps even the soupçon of a hint of resistance to the
dominant capitalist war culture -- which was, in those early years of
which I have spoken, conducting a campaign of systematic genocide in Southeast Asia.

Power,
money and class were the dominant forces in the NY art world of those
days... as too, of course these days. What other forces were ever at
work in NYC duh.

So
perforce all the silly antics of the far-out art crew were always going
to have a common objective: to arrange somehow to be lifted up out of
the squalor and poverty of the artistic life, adopted from above,
invited
into that grand world of power, money and class.

It
was soon learned that there were other troughs to carefully line up and
act adorably before, in order to be permitted to swill at leisure.
Major corporations, in particular, and their servants, the major
universities, would provide a useful, clean, orderly system of
inducement
and reward to divert creative effort into obedient repetition of
previous
models. The previous models were soon enough quickly exhausted. The
students who
were taught the methods were meanwhile not taught the histories of the
methods, as
their teachers were/are unaware of the histories. Too much trouble
actually knowing anything. Names and reputations, previously restricted
to the relatively limited status of fairly important considerations, but
never quite the proverbial be-all and end-all (lovely saying that, her
unconscious revival of it the one thing we have to thank Sarah Palin
for), became now the ONLY considerations.

Words like "iconic" came into being.

During
this period, "arts management" and "curating", those other terrifying words, sprang up, Topsy-like, as
viable career options for vapid young suburbanoid things wanting to get
close to a life of risk and danger and freedom they would never have if
merely restricted to their own nil talents and nil imaginations. Soon
enough, mutatis mutandis, the managers and the curators WERE the action.
Getting close with THEM became the primary achievement, from which all
else would follow.

I
taught poetry to aspiring writers for some 25 years. Every student in
every class was there for the same reason. They felt their individual
expressive voices were doomed to be lost in a sea of contending
individual voices, all aching to be heard.

Somewhere
around the middle of that 25 year trajectory I became aware that it was
being proposed out there in the great world that one might actually skip learning the history and the art altogether, and just
become conceptual. A shortcut, in short.

Such
a nice, elevated, impressive term. So clean, useful, evasive. Safe,
nonthreatening. Who could be so mean, so ungenerous, as to look unkindly
upon a concept.

And
of course, theall-important accessories. Where there's a concept
there's always got to be an explanation to go along, a lecture to
follow, a
performance to be endured, a spinoff performance for the
hypermasochistic, and so on. A self-replicating machine. An industry.

And yet the depths of the gold mine had even then not yet been fully plumbed.

Now
we have what...? The fossilized bones of the raiders of the lost art of
poetry,
yearning to be, like, you know, Super Super Famous, like Kenny G -- who,
bet you ten bucks, fully expects his name will be remembered,
catalogued, inscribed on the cornerstones of handsomely endowed,
formidably agglomerated campus buildings and the like, long
after Mike Brown's is forgot, except maybe as a footnote, in the Penn
Clown archive, when the curator comes to the blank spot where the tape
of the historic Brown University show should be.

Need #CDs or #DVDs of your work or product? We can produce millions #replication: image via Zero Six Media @zero6media, 9 February 2015

When the time comes (as it inevitably will) and some esteemed poetic coroner is called upon to dissect Kenny's "body poetic", it will come as no suprise that said corpus was never alive in the first place.

BTW, KG has more Google "hits" than EP does--once again demonstrating the fact that old Ez's "Make It New" maxim is definitely old hat.

Seems like there are oodles of them, but maybe it's just the one guy wearing different funny hats. Anyway I imagine scads, like those terracotta soldiers in China but less interesting. I buy their/his books for the store, but by shape and color. "That oblong gray-green thing sells, I'll buy two".